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4/16/14

Books to Get You in the Passover Spirit

It’s that time again, ladies and gents: that’s right, the
Passover and Easter season. Easter bunnies everywhere, Manischewitz wine
flying off the shelves- you know the drill.

We’ll be celebrating both in my house, and I’m the one in charge of the Passover seder, but boy
am I not prepared this year because it kind of snuck up on me. So along
with thinking about all the things I have to buy for the seder and
everything I have to cook, I started thinking about some books that
could help get us in the mood for this holiday.

After all, Passover is quite the bookish tradition since everyone
sits around a table and, you know, READS FROM A BOOK (this particular
book is called a “haggadah”). The haggadah recounts the story of the
Jewish exodus from Egypt.

But let me just refresh everyone’s memory for a minute: so God’s
like, “yo, Moses, your people are pretty hard up, building those
pyramids and all, so imma gonna help ‘em. Go to Pharaoh and be like,
‘hey, let my people go, dude. If you don’t, God’s gonna get all plague-y
on yo’ ass.’” And Moses is like, “wut? I gotta do all that?”
and God’s like, “DO. IT.” So Moses says let my people go and Pharaoh
says hells no and Moses says please and Pharaoh says hells no (and this
goes on for a while), and God sends plagues on Egypt until Pharaoh says
“FINE GET THE HELL OUT. Now go before I change my mind.” And the Jews
grab their gear and hightail it outta there. With the flat bread that
turns to cement in your stomach (otherwise known as “matzoh”).

Ok, now to the books. I’ve put together a brief list of books to read
or reread that have something to do with the themes of Passover
(slavery/freedom, the creation of a people, a long journey, etc.). Now,
the haggadah focuses on how the Jews became enslaved and the process of
convincing Pharaoh to let them leave. But here I’m also going to extend
the story to include what happened after the exodus began (i.e. the wandering in the desert). Enjoy!

The Odyssey (first transcribed c.725 BCE) by Homer:
Talk about a long journey! The Trojan War is over and Odysseus is all
about getting home to his woman, but a bunch of things hold him up,
including a freaky cyclops and of course ol’ Scylla and Charybdis. The
Passover connection? Well, when the Jews left Egypt and set out across
the desert to begin their new lives, all kinds of bad/annoying things
went down. And the whining began. The sea wouldn’t part, the sand was itchy, the manna from heaven was boring, Moses was taking too long up on that mountain
(etc.). But what would the Jews’ journey have been like without all of
these interruptions and calamities? BORING. So there’s that.

The Canterbury Tales (first transcribed 1387-1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer:
Again, here we have a long journey with a specific endpoint. In the
Passover story, the Jews were hoofing it to get to the Promised Land,
and there were a lot of Jews, and the journey took 40 years so you can
only imagine what that must have been like. The pilgrims in Canterbury Tales, too, form a motley crew, and get on each other’s nerves, and yet they stick together.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) by Frederick Douglass:
Douglass’s Narrative is one of the most powerful texts in
English about the spiritual and literal journey from slavery to freedom.
Like Douglass, who realizes that he must pursue freedom through his own
hard work and determination, Moses pursues freedom by becoming the
spokesman for the Jews when dealing with Pharaoh and a mediator between
them and God when God feels like hurling thunder bolts at the often
whiney group. And of course the story of Moses, the Exodus, and the
journey to the Promised Land is a major trope in 19th-century African
American literature and music.

Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43) by Thomas Mann:
Yes, this tetralogy is almost 1500 pages long, but this is Thomas Mann,
so it’s completely worth it. Written over a ten-year period, during
which the Nazis took power and the world plunged into war, Joseph
is an extended meditation on the nature of freedom and determination in
human lives (among many other things). Mann tells the story of the
Biblical Joseph, sold to some traders by his jealous half-brothers and
ultimately taken to Egypt, where he goes from being a lowly servant to a
powerful leader. Things go so well for him that, when famine strikes
the area, he brings his family to Egypt where there’s food, and they
stay there, and before you know it, tons of Jews are in Egypt and the
pharaohs are starting to get pretty pissed. It’s at this point that Mann
leaves off, and where the story of Passover begins. Mann’s tetralogy- I
really can’t explain how lyrical and mesmerizing it is. You become part
of the narrative just by reading it, seeing ancient Egypt through
Joseph’s eyes, hearing the sounds of trade and the Nile, smelling the
spices and animals…Trust me, set aside a month or whatever and read Joseph and His Brothers.

Go Down, Moses (1942) by William Faulkner
Faulkner took this title from the African American spiritual that includes the refrain:

Go down, Moses,

Way down in Egypt’s land,

Tell old Pharaoh,

Let my people go.

This spiritual is also famous for having been sung by the famous African American contralto Marian Anderson
in the 20th century. Faulkner’s novel focuses on race relations in the
American South from before the Civil War until World War II. The book
itself, though, is not so much a “novel” in the traditional sense as a
series of interconnected stories that view race and family from a
multitude of angles.

People of the Book (2008) by Geraldine Brooks
This novel by Geraldine Brooks is one of my all-time favorites. It
focuses on an actual historical haggadah that was created in medieval
Spain and traveled around the world, picking up bits and pieces of the
lives it touched and fossilizing them within its beautifully-illustrated
pages (an insect’s wing, a wine stain…). Brooks alternates between
imagining the people through whose hands the haggadah passed and
describing the work of Hannah Heath, a rare-book expert who is hired to
uncover its secrets and help preserve it for the future.

* * *

Well, there you have it. If anyone at the seder table asks you what
you’ve been reading, you can whip out this list and tell ‘em. Don’t be
offended if their eyes glaze over, cause you do sit at that table for a really long time and then there’s all that food and the cardboard-tasting matzoh and everything. You’re welcome.